Interview with Rob Myers by Matt Lee

Rob Myers is an artist, hacker and free culture activist who has been
remixing images and coding up art for more than fifteen years. He held
the first solo all-copyleft-licensed art show, has been involved with
community projects such as Free Culture UK and Remix Reading, and has
advised on corporate projects such as "Where Are The Joneses?" and
"4Laughs."

Matt: Rob, you are known to many for your commentary on free
culture, both on and offline. I imagine you interact with this
community a lot, what is that like?

Rob: It's always good to find out how free culture touches on
different people's interests, not just activists'. One of the best
discussions of music copyright I've had was with the driver of a bus I
was on who turned out to be a Beatles fan and knew about the George
Harrison "My Sweet Lord" case. Another time I spoke to an artist at
her private view who'd almost lost her funding for that show because
the funding body wanted her to track down every single copyright
holder and get permission from them for all the found video footage
she'd used.

People have different views on how free culture should be approached,
and discussing my own views with others is a way of learning about the
issues and keeping honest. Finding out how things are different around
the world helps to keep a sense of perspective as well. When I talked
about Creative Commons licenses in Serbia, people just laughed and
told me that copyright didn't apply there. In the UK the activity
around the Gowers Review Of "Intellectual Property" was very positive.

Matt: As an author, both online as well as in occasional printed
form, what are your thoughts on ebooks and ebook readers like the
Amazon Kindle?

Rob: As someone who has been through art school and designed books
and other materials for print, I really appreciate the different
qualities of paper and ink. I love finding an old Art & Language
monograph in a book stall. But I also enjoy being able to get classic
texts from Project Gutenberg and read them or search them or feed them
into a Markov chain. And having reference works in electronic format
is very convenient. I think eBooks complement and extend what is
possible with physical books rather than replacing them entirely.

What breaks the commercialization and wider adoption of eBooks, the
same as it did for digital music formats, is DRM. I've owned physical
books with anti-photocopying printing or with restrictive licenses
printed in them and that is bad but it is nothing compared to DRM.

Kindle, as well as being a horrible piece of industrial design with a
disempowering user experience, is encumbered with DRM. I just hope
that Amazon follow the same path, away from DRM, that Apple seems to
be following. But that will take competition--and with a few notable
exceptions, the other eBook vendors all seem to be using DRM as well.

I want DVD-style special editions of print books as eBooks, I want the
potential of hypertext to be realized, and I want a good platform for
generative literature all on something like a Kindle but with
industrial design by IDEO and software by GNU. I don't want my old
ASCII files uploaded to Amazon, made useless by the addition of DRM,
then downloaded to something that I'd be embarrassed to be seen on the
tube with.

Matt: What do you think of tivoization? What does it mean for free
culture?

Rob: I don't understand people, usually developers, who want to
privilege Tivo's ability to modify software that wasn't their's to
start with over the freedom of the actual users of that software to do
the same. If those developers had been in the position of these users
when they wanted to develop the software that they are happy to see
tivoized, they would not have been able to. I'm very glad that GPLv3
tackles tivoization.

Tivoization can lock you out of access to cultural work and personal
memorabilia that you own or have created. Its legal or technological
form is unimportant when considering its practical effects. This is
true of DRM as well. Those within the free culture movement can and
should tackle these issues alongside those within the free software
movement.

Matt: You've written a few pieces of free software for artists--most
of these are now released under version 3 of the GPL. What's the hold
up on Minara?

Rob: I regard software freedom as a principle to be protected rather
than as the product of a particular license. GPLv3 seems to be an
effective and proportionate response to challenges to that principle
that have emerged over the last decade or so. Arguing that tivoization
or DRM are not or should not be part of the GPL's remit does not make
sense: they are threats to the freedom of software that didn't exist a
decade ago in much the same way that the threats to older versions of
the GPL tackled didn't exist forty years ago.

Minara (Minara Is Not A Recursive Algorithm) is a programmable
graphics program editor. A kind of Emacs for vector graphics. The
program, its tools, and the images it edits are all written in
user-editable Scheme. I used some Scheme code from a third party that
seems to be GPLv2 only and I need to find the author of that code to
relicense it. The moral of this is that people need to make it clear
that their code is licensed GPL version x or later.

Matt: On the subject of the Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader, Mark
Pilgrim pointed out that "The Right To Read" was supposed to be a
warning, not a design document--what would be your message to authors
unaware of the dangers of DRM books?

Rob: Don't mistake a protection racket for job security. Find out
what authors like Cory Doctorow have to say about the negative effects
that DRM has on your relationship with your readers and customers,
and, look at their examples of turning unauthorized copying into free
promotion. Using copyleft and network effects to drive sales is a
strategy that works, Hasbro adopted it for their relaunch of the
Dungeons & Dragons game books a few years back.

And don't forget that DRM-free music still sells well and is now being
called for by music retailers as well as fans.

Matt: Finally, as web applications become increasingly common, what
dangers do you see ahead, as the possibility of hosted graphics and
design software becomes ever closer? Do you think the newly released
GNU Affero GPL will help?

Rob: Software as service may be the next great threat to software
freedom. It is tivoization for the web. Web 2.0 may just be Google's
aftermarket--"economic heat noise" as Eben Moglen accurately described
it. But the trend to utility computing and The Cloud means that not
just executable software but data will be locked away outside of
users' control.

As an artist or author, I wouldn't want to use hosted software or
store my work primarily on a hosted service. If there is an earthquake
or an economic slump near my data center, I don't want to lose my
work.

AGPL will help with access to software, but not with access to data or
cultural work, at least not directly. Common formats, web services,
and user rights charters are needed as much as access to code--which
you will need to pay for access to The Cloud to run anyway. Free
culture can help both to make the case for this environment and to
provide and protect content for participants in it.